NewOrbit Space

NewOrbit designs satellites that fly between about 200 and 300 kilometres up, two to three times closer to the ground than most. A camera that sees 50 centimetre detail from a normal 500 kilometre orbit sees 25 centimetres from there, and radio signals have less distance to cover. At that height there is still enough air to drag a satellite down within weeks, so it needs an engine that runs most of the time to stay up.

That engine is AURA, a radio-frequency ion thruster NewOrbit has developed in-house since 2021 and designed to run on more than one gas. Before Christmas 2025 its whole propulsion chain ran for 200 hours on the ground, 150 of them on air and 50 on xenon. NewOrbit presented NEO-1, its first satellite, in July 2025 as an air-breathing design that would collect the thin air around it and use it as propellant. A January 2026 description of NEO-1 says its engine carries stored propellant instead, and the air-breathing version is now sold separately as AURA-RAM. In September 2026 the company finished six engineering models of the latest AURA and started the tests that qualify it for flight.

Anatolii Papulov and Ruslan Rakhimov founded the company in Reading in 2021, and it has about 30 staff. ESA has paid for two pieces of the engine work, a 2024 test of the air-breathing thruster with its cathode and a 2026 contract to get AURA ready for launch. A Series A led by Voyager Ventures in June 2026 pays for a production facility, due to open in early 2027. Nothing has flown yet. NEO-1 has a launch booked for the third quarter of 2028 and will carry up to eight customer payloads. Genesia, the Japanese company that built the telescope on JAXA's low-flying Tsubame satellite, has booked the first slot.